An abridged edition of John Cheever's journals, which he began in the late 1940s and continued for more than three decades, provides a revealing study of the author, his personal life, his literary art, and his emotional life.

Thomas Bernhard was one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. His formal innovation ranks with Beckett and Kafka, his outrageously cantankerous voice recalls Dostoevsky, but his gift for lacerating, lyrical, provocative prose is incomparably his own.One of Bernhard's most acclaimed novels, The Loser centers on a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of...

The famed author of If Beale Street Could Talk reveals his personal response to American racism and offers a new statement on the present racial crises in Africa and the United States, in a candid, insightful portrait of his own life, set against the turbulent backdrop of the 1960s and early 1970s. Reprint.

A treasury of essays, articles and reviews by the late author of Giovanni's Room includes pieces that explore such topics as religious fundamentalism, Russian literature and the possibility of an African-American president.

"Mountain," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a...

The questions, discussion topics, author biography, and bibliography that follow are designed to enhance your group's reading of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita . We hope they will provide you with ways of looking at-and talking about-a novel that has become a permanent part of the American literary canon, and indeed of the American language, without losing its capacity to dazzle, baffle, and at times shock the unwary reader.

Of all the great Japanese novelists, Kobe Abe was indubitably the most versatile. WithThe Ruined Map, he crafted a mesmerizing literary crime novel that combines the narrative suspense of Chandler with the psychological depth of Dostoevsky....

An English butler reflects--sometimes bitterly, sometimes humorously--on his service to a lord between the two world wars and discovers doubts about his master's character and about the ultimate value of his own service to humanity

The playwright and novelist Thomas Bernhard was one of the most widely translated and admired writers of his generation, winner of the three most coveted literary prizes in Germany.Gargoyles, one of his earliest novels, is a singular, surreal study of the nature of humanity....

It is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, named Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of the celebrated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As their once-casual friendship quickens, these two eccentric men begin to discover in each other a possible antidote to...

Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.